Re: Advice on dictionary conversion

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 9:14 PM, Ciaran S Duibhmn
<ciaran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I wish to convert a bilingual dictionary from MS-Word format to
> "properly"-tagged XML, and I hope I may ask for some comment on the
> feasibility of this, using XSLT or otherwise.
>
> First I found several programs which automatically convert the Word files
to
> FO:XSL, either from .doc or .rtf.  My preferred one of those I examined is
> the Novosoft converter (http://www.rtf-to-xml.com/).

If you need to analyze, understand and parse the resulting XML then
FO, straight from Word, does not seem the best pivot format; the
simplest pivot format the better.

Here is a simple (free) tool to transform RTF to XML:
http://memberwebs.com/stef/software/rtfx/

It doesn't try to return every single detail of the source file but
seems sufficient for most needs (it correctly identifies titles,
lists, emphasis, and tables).

The resulting XML, being much simpler, should make more sense than FO.

Then by a series of successive small transformations you should bring
this source XML closer and closer to your target format...

Regards,
EB